Watching a TV show from 15 years ago, one thing made me smile: Someone was quickly trying to get online, and cursing because her mouse had become unplugged!
I don’t know about you but my mouse is wireless (and has been for as long as I can remember). Same goes for my TV remote, earbuds and so on. Wireless tech is everywhere nowadays, and so it’s natural DJs will wonder about using it for what we do as well.
Whether it’s wirelessly connecting speakers to a DJ set-up so you don’t have to run cables across a big venue (a mobile DJ bugbear), or using headphones that don’t have a pesky cable for you to accidentally yank or trip on, all of these things have the potential to make your life easier.
Want me to show you how to do this?
We have a lesson inside our Access All Areas package where I personally show you how all of this is done. You look “over my shoulder” as I explain the what, why and how of using wireless tech for DJing.
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Combine this kind of technology with battery-powered gear, and you can set up and DJ anywhere, any place without running cables – and that includes to mains electricity. It’s fun!
So what do we need to consider before we start investing in kit that can cut some of the wires out for us?
There are three crucial things that we need to bear in mind every time we want to replace a good old-fashioned cable with something wireless. They are:
1. Latency
2. Battery life
3. Reliability & quality
In this article, we’ll look at many of the things we can do today with our DJ set-ups that are wireless… and consider some things we cannot (and why), bearing in mind those three crucial things I just mentioned.
Where are we at?
You may think that wireless tech and DJing don’t really work together, but you’d be wrong. One area where wireless tech has been used for years is wireless microphones.
Nowadays, wireless microphone systems are pretty reliable, no longer analogue (digital for clearer sound), and operate using the kind of radio technology that means they are very low latency. In other words, there is no perceivable gap between someone speaking and the voice making its way to the DJ mixer and then the speakers.
Read this next: A DJ’s Guide To Microphones
They have decent batteries built in so they can be relied upon to keep working for the duration of an event, and as long as they’re chosen carefully for the country or state where they’re being operated, and from a reputable brand, they’re reliable, too.
So let’s look at some of the other areas wireless tech can be used by DJs, and talk about some of the gear that’s out there to help with this.
5 Technologies That Are Making Wireless DJing Possible
1. Phase – for turntables
Phase is a wireless solution that ingeniously solves the problem of turning traditional turntables into “DVS” (digital vinyl system) turntables. The little box plugs into your computer (and sometimes your mixer too), acting as a receiver, charger and docking station for two domino-sized transmitters, one for each record deck.
The transmitter units have a hole in the middle that slides over the record deck spindle. These are basically gyroscopes, sending info back to the receiver about how quickly the turntable is turning and in which direction.
Armed with this information, the software will allow you to “control” the digital decks by manipulating the turntables.
Why wireless? Because old-style DVS systems involved cumbersome and unreliable “control vinyl” and needed you to use needles – this is simpler, quicker to set up and more reliable.
Why it works: The amount of information being shared is low, and the proprietary radio system is fast, meaning unnoticeable latency. The batteries last for even the longest DJ set, and – after some initial bumps – the reliability is excellent.
2. SKAA and SonicLink – for speakers
SKAA is a technology that is being built-in to certain DJ and audio gear, offering ultra low latency audio connections without the need for wires.
We first came across SKAA when the speaker manufacturer Soundboks included SKAA linking in its speakers. You see, battery-powered speaker manufacturers have traditionally included Bluetooth, both for connecting audio equipment to those speakers (for instance, your phone), and for “ganging ” those speakers together – think Bose, Anker etc.
However, this is absolutely no good for DJing. Why? Because it fails two of our tests: reliability and latency. There is an easily audible “gap” between music playing and coming out of Bluetooth speakers.
Read this next: The Problem With DJ Speakers (& How To Fix It)
It’s not so easy to spot when just streaming music from your smartphone (although press the play/pause button repeatedly and observe the delay), but with DJ gear, it’s instant. You can hear it by comparing what’s coming out of your headphones with what’s coming out of any Bluetooth-linked speakers, should you ever try to set such a thing up.
Enter SKAA. It’s built into Soundboks speakers and other brands too nowadays. A simple button press links two of that company’s speakers with SKAA (not Bluetooth), whose pro implementation has low enough latency for it to be unnoticeable. It’s also supremely reliable over quite a large distance – plenty for a pair of party speakers.
What’s more, under the company’s public-facing brand of Dillinger, this SKAA Pro tech is available in standalone battery-powered transmitter and receiver form, meaning you could easily plug a transmitter into the output of your DJ gear, and either “broadcast” directly to Soundboks speakers, or pair the transmitter with a receiver or receivers plugged into any PA system.
Recently, AlphaTheta has got in on the game too with its Wave Eight PA speakers. These speakers come with its own SonicLink wireless connection to your DJ gear by plugging a special transmitter that’s provided with the speakers into your controller. You can immediately set up a stereo pair without doing much else (other than hitting the pairing button).
As these can use battery power, it makes it really easy to set up a quick PA system outdoors for DJing, especially if you’re using a battery all-in-one system such as the Numark Mixstream Pro Go.
Why wireless? Because it sometimes isn’t practical or preferable to run long XLR audio cables, especially outdoors, and especially with battery-powered PA-style speakers like the Soundboks. This way, you can have loud music covering a large area, using batteries to power all gear, and no need for many metres of cables.
Why it works: The proprietary radio format keeps things reliable and keeps the latency low, and manufacturers building it into their gear makes it super-simple to set up (though the standalone receiver/transmitter are pretty simple already).
3. W+ Link, SonicLink & SKAA – for headphones
AIAIAI is a respected headphone manufacturer that makes modular headphones aimed at both consumers and at pro DJs and producers. Not only has the company launched a variant of its headphones called the TMA-2 Studio Wireless+, which gives an option for using hi-fi headphones in the studio that don’t have a cable between them and the mixer, but they’ve recently followed up with a louder, even lower latency DJ version, the TMA-2 DJ Wireless.
While tech like this has periodically been available (and actually, there’s also a pair of SKAA-enabled headphones out there too), these headphones were launched with a bit of a fanfare by no lesser than Richie Hawtin, who endorsed it for studio use.
These systems work by plugging a small device into the headphones output of your DJ gear or studio mixer. The device looks like a phone battery charger (and indeed, you need to charge it first, as it is a battery as well as a transmitter). Then, you charge the headphones, pair the two, and you’re off.
In other words, it is similar to using Bluetooth headphones, except of course that while most consumer audio gear nowadays has Bluetooth transmission built in, DJ and production gear never does – which is why you need the transmitter module too.
Read this next: 5 Things To Look For In DJ Headphones
People often ask, “Why can’t I use a Bluetooth speaker or headphones with my DJ controller?”, and the answer is two-fold: First, the gear doesn’t have Bluetooth built-in, and second, the latency is too high, which is also the reason gear doesn’t have Bluetooth built-in to begin with.
With W+ Link, as long as both the transmitter and headphones are charged, you get effectively latency-free audio, meaning it is suddenly fine for use by DJs and producers.
AlphaTheta’s HDJ-F10 headphones work like this too, and are available in a pack with a similar transmitter. But if you happen to own the XDJ-AZ standalone DJ controller, then this has a button on it that you can press to pair instantly with the headphones, so you don’t even need a separate transmitter – it’s all built-in.
It’s great fun and hard to go back to wired headphones when you’re used to it.
Why wireless? For DJs, no tripping over the headphones cable! And for producers, it’s nice to wander around while hearing what’s going on. This tech has advantages for anyone who doesn’t want to be “tied to the console” while being creative.
Why does it work? Because the tech is effectively latency-free, the audio quality is very good, and both units can be charged for many hours of battery life – all of which results in a practical and elegant solution.
4. Bluetooth controllers – for Midi
Whoa, didn’t I say Bluetooth is a no-go for DJing and by extension for time-critical tasks in general? Surely Midi – the sending of musical info down a cable – is time sensitive?
Well yeah it is, but here’s the thing: It is the amount of information that needs to be sent for high quality audio that – combined with the way Bluetooth works – causes latency. If the amount of info is tiny, it turns out that Bluetooth can work just fine.
This crops up in a few places, but the most recent ones in the DJ world are the AlphaTheta DDJ-FLX2 controller that can talk wirelessly to an iPad (for instance), and a similar controller from Hercules called the DJControl Mix Ultra, which can do the same thing.
This kind of link is also what enables Bluetooth keyboards (like the one I am typing on now), computer mice, and so on.
Why wireless? In this case, because it makes connection easier and cheaper with the notoriously under-specified iPad design (when it comes to inputs and outputs, anyway), which gives ultra-casual DJs and beginners a quick way to get started before investing in better gear, wired equipment and so on.
Why does it work? As mentioned, the amount of info being carried is very low, which makes it easy to get right. Bluetooth is low power, low battery, and reliable at close range.
5. Streaming services – for music files
Increasingly, it is possible to stream music directly into DJ gear, no local copies necessary. Pioneer’s high-end CDJ-3000s let DJs connect to their Dropbox accounts to stream their own collections. Denon DJ and Numark’s standalone DJ systems all have Ethernet and WiFi built in, for direct streaming from TIDAL, Beatport, Beatsource, and Soundcloud Go+ into DJ gear. Use your mobile phone’s personal hotspot and you can pluck tunes out of the air this way even when there is no WiFi.
Read this next: The Best Music Streaming Services For DJs
With the world relying more and more on subscription streaming music services, it was inevitable that they’d start to appear in DJ software – and with the cloud increasingly becoming the way we store our data, same for our own music collections.
Why wireless? It’s not actually always wireless (wired Ethernet), but usually it is. And of course if you want to use music you don’t have, you have no choice but to grab it as you need it.
Why it works: If the internet goes down, it doesn’t. But there are two things that lessen that chance. First, most of these systems download the whole track before they let you play it (or at least, while you are playing the first few seconds of it) – once it is downloaded, if the internet goes off, it doesn’t matter. As the track is local, there’s no latency. Some even let you download whole playlists before you start playing, as a local “cache”.
Finally…
The biggest thing to understand here is that any solution aimed at DJs or musicians (and we haven’t covered them all, for instance we’ve skated over wireless DMX for lighting, and the aforementioned wireless microphones) must have no noticeable latency, have good battery power if its needed, and be both reliable and high quality.
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The big no-no is Bluetooth, for the reasons I’ve outlined above. As soon as you look past that tech though, there are lots of interesting examples of more specialised companies bringing really interesting and effective solutions to market. If you want to start cutting the cables out of your DJ system, there are more options than ever before, and it seems to be growing all the time.
Phil Morse
